Financial markets generally afford the opportunity for investors to purchase an asset in order to achieve some degree of profitability. Investment vehicles such as stocks, trusts, mutual funds, pension funds, money markets, and bonds represent example investment instruments that offer investors a choice for allocating capital.
In many (but certainly not all) trading environments, trades take place in a trading pit where a face-to-face encounter occurs. This is where buyers and sellers physically converge on the specialist who matches buyers with sellers. However, electronic communications (via computers) play a big part in the trading process. All trades are “auctions.” There is no set price, although the last trade is often considered to be the “price” of a stock. In reality, the price is the highest amount any buyer is willing to pay at any given moment. When demand for a certain stock is high, the various buyers bid the price higher to induce sellers to sell. When demand for a stock is low, sellers must sell at lower prices to attract buyers and the price drops.
Once a trader is duly authorized in any given system, traders can then begin feeding trade requests to the trading pit such that their proposed transactions can be secured. In most scenarios, traders are simply accommodating the needs of their clients or customers who are seeking to purchase or to sell a given commodity. Note that the trader's actual “trading desk” can be quite comprehensive, as well as restricting and cumbersome. Traders are normally equipped with a number of phone lines, as well as a number of data feeds that allow the given trader to be aware of market prices, market actively, and news that may affect the markets. This information is exceptionally time sensitive, as real-time data represents a powerful tool for any successful trader. In addition, such data feeds need to effectively transport corresponding market data: maintaining the integrity of the information as it propagates across the network. Potentially millions of dollars (involved in a single trade) lie in the delicate balance, as even the smallest computational error or even the most minor data corruption could spell financial disaster for the associated trader.
Hence the ability to offer a convenient and an effective platform for executing optimal trading presents a significant obstacle for system designers, network architectures, and component manufacturers.